Working with Dashboard Notifications

One of the truly unique aspects of webOS is the Dashboard and the use of Notifications. A dashboard icon may appear if you get an email or text message, or maybe because you have an app like Top Stocks or Sports Live! that provides updates through the dashboard, or you may just have an icon indicating that your phone is attached to a computer that will allow you to enter USB Drive mode. So, there are a few things that you need to know about how to best use those notifications. Keep reading after the break for details

When the dashboard is minimized, you will just see small icons start to appear from the right of the screen. To maximize the dashboard, just click anywhere across the screen in that bottom area, from the black space on the left to the icons on the right (The exact spot of your tap does not matter).

Once maximized, you can see the details of each notification, possibly including the number of notifications that you have stacked up (e.g. count of emails or missed calls or new tweets). Note that in many cases, you will only be able to see the latest message that has appeared without an ability to scroll through them.

To act on these notifications, you may be able to do the following:

If the notification has left/right arrows, you can move through the listing of information. In the example to the right, Top Stocks allows you to move through a listing of different stock quotes directly in the dashboard

A music player, including apps like Radio Time or Pandora, will allow you to act on the music you are listening to, from pausing to skipping to the next track

Often, notifications may have separate actions for the icon on the left-hand side of the screen versus the notification that takes up the remainder of the screen. Usually, clicking on the icon will bring you to the top-level of an app, whereas clicking on the detail will bring you to the specific section of the app.

For example, here is a sample of notifications for email, missed calls, and text messages

If you click on the email icon, you will be taken to your Inbox, whereas if you click on the main body of the notification, you will be brought to the actual email message

This works for the same the missed call notification. Clicking the icon will take you to your Call Log (within the Phone app), whereas clicking the detailing notification will actually initiate a call to that person

However, for many apps, this does not always work. For the text message notification in the example above, clicking on either the icon or the notification will both take you to the most recently received text message, not your conversations list and leave the notification icon in your dashboard with the prior text message notification showing

In addition, other apps follow their own convention. For example, in the app Sports Live!, clicking on the icon will cycle through the scores of your "favorite" teams, while clicking the detail notification will cycle through the details of that specific game.

So, as you install new apps, make sure your understand how that app uses the dashboard.

Finally, if you want to dismiss the notification, either because you don't care to go to the app itself or because you are done with the app, you can simply swipe the notification off the screen to either the right or left, similar to how you swipe to delete items throughout webOS.

So, anyone else have any other suggestions or tips on how best to use the notifications?